Vespers, October 14: Dealing with Life’s Big Questions?
We need to know that is good to ask questions!
Matt 10:16
1 John 4:1
My question:
God, why have you betrayed me? Why have you left and forsaken me?
Deut 31:6
My Story:
First – normal details, 1 sister, am an uncle, my sister isn’t married.
Grew up in LaCrosse Wisconsin, I’ll cheer for the pack until I die
Blessed with godly parents
Grew up in a Christian home, grandson of a pastor, uncle was a pastor, I went to church every Sunday, attended a Christian school my entire life, and I had Christian friends my whole life.
My faith became my own in middle school
Throughout high school I grew, but never faced any substantial persecution for my faith
During my junior year I started playing guitar with my friend for his youth group. He attended a charismatic church and thus I was introduced to the Holy Spirit for the first time
As I was introduced, nobody ever mentioned that the Bible teaches us to be discerning, thus I felt that if I thought the Holy Spirit was speaking to me it would be outright sinful to say it wasn’t the Holy Spirit!
I got very tied up trying to please God by doing everything he was leading me to do. This got me entrenched in a works righteousness mentality.
In an intense time of worship one night, I can distinctly remember being very aware that in that moment I was completely moldable in God’s hand. “God, whatever you want!” In that moment I prayed that God would completely consume my life for him, I prayed that our relationship would be more intimate than it had ever imagined before, and I prayed that I would be a godly man, a man of faith
This is where things started to fall apart, everything that I had learned about God and the Holy Spirit just began to fall apart, nothing made sense
No matter how hard I tried, I could not hear God’s voice
I began to see that what God had told me concerning what my relationship with him would look like was not at all what I was experiencing
I began to say, “God, you said my life with you would look like this way, but it doesn’t! What is going on? Where are you?
I began to realize that God had turned his back on me, that he had betrayed me
I did not know hot to reconcile my feelings with what I was hearing at church and reading in the Bible: Duet 31:6
Throughout my senior year I mostly dealt with this conflict by ignoring the whole thing, I went through the motions
I took a year off between high school and college and during this year I revisited the issue
I had to become honest with myself and with another person, I had to live in the light
I had to decide if I was going to let my experience be my source of truth or if I would let the Word of God be my source of truth
I chose God’s Word and as I worked toward believe God’s Word instead of my experience I began to see that I had interpreted my experience incorrectly
What I had called God forsaking my for the past two years was in reality God answering the prayer I prayed when all of this started
What does it mean to say that ‘Jesus is Lord’, to ‘believe that God raised him from the dead’?
Belief is accepting something as true
Faith is completely believing something that you can’t prove
If God exists and he is Lord, then anything and everything that he says goes, 2Tim 3:16 says the whole Bible is God breathed and useful for teaching, instructing in righteousness.
This is the point I had to come to accept before I could see God’s healing in my life, as I put my faith in God’s Word despite my feelings of betrayal I began to taste and see that the Lord is good
I believe this is where we need to start whenever we face difficult questions in life
This does not mean we have all the answers, it doesn’t mean life gets easy, it doesn’t mean we won’t have pain, but it does mean we have hope
Do we really believe verses like Romans 8:35 and 37, Romans 8:28, and 1Pe 5:8?
God, why have you betrayed me? Why have you left and forsaken me?
Or do I choose to believe God’s Word?
Deut 31:6
No comments:
Post a Comment